English

Twelve scored books, four per board, classes 6 to 9, and the only subject in the corpus where every single volume is English-medium and therefore quotation-grade. That makes English the highest-confidence subject in the study and the one where board differences can be stated without hedging. Structurally the three boards do the same thing — a graded reader of units built on reading, vocabulary, grammar and writing — but they are three genuinely independent anthologies on three different curriculum bases: Punjab on SNC 2022 with a revised NCP-2023 class-9 volume, Sindh on an undated SPELT-developed series, KP on National Curriculum 2006. Only two texts are common to all three boards: the Farewell Sermon and Wordsworth's Daffodils.

The shape from 6 to 9 differs by board rather than by age. Punjab opens every one of its four books with a Seerah or Sahaba unit (Seerat-un-Nabi, The Last Sermon, Tolerance of the Rasoolullah, The Saviour of Mankind) and holds A1 flat at 4 across all four grades. Its militarism runs 5, 5, 2, 4: Major Shabbir Sharif and A Poem by a Soldier at class 6, with Rashid Minhas as the model essay for teaching essay structure; Martyrs of Pakistan at class 7 with the writing task "Nishan-e-Haider and its significance"; and the full eleven-name roll of honour inside the class-9 Patriotism unit, where the comprehension, cause-and-effect and fact-versus-opinion exercises are all built on the martyrs. Class 8 is the only break. Sindh's readers carry zero religious selections at classes 6, 7 and 8 and one at class 9, and no military martyr anywhere; the single Nishan-e-Haider string in the whole Sindh corpus is a wrong-answer distractor in an MCQ about Bilquis Edhi. KP has no Nishan-e-Haider in any of its four books, a quarter of its selections are world literature, and it carries the corpus's only ordinary non-Muslim Pakistani child protagonist, the Sikh Pakhtun Vikram Singh.

The reader is also where two boards smuggle in what their social-studies books omit. KP's class-6 Democracy lesson and its class-9 unit pairing the Madina Charter with the 1948 UDHR are the only teaching of a named international rights instrument anywhere in KP, absent from both its Pakistan Studies volumes. Punjab's strongest civic passage in twelve books — "Media is known as the fourth pillar of democracy" — is in the class-7 reader, and the same book delivers the Two-Nation Theory, the 1940 Lahore address and the Fourteen Points a year before the History syllabus gets there.

Scores: A1 (Punjab 4/4/4/4, KP 3/4/4/4, Sindh 2/2/2/3), plus A2, A5, A6 and A7. The reader comparison is confounded by vintage and cannot be controlled. Readability separates cleanly: Sindh has the only monotonic gradient (Flesch-Kincaid 5.5 to 7.6), Punjab is flat then discontinuous at the 8/9 boundary, KP spikes at class 8 with the longest sentences in the corpus, a cost of its unlevelled classic-anthology prose. Absent everywhere: any Urdu-medium English reader; any Pakistani regional-language selection in translation; and, in Punjab, any translation exercise at all.

Two coverage notes. The scored set stops at class 9, so nothing here speaks to the matriculation year; class-10 English readers from Punjab and KP have since been added to the corpus and carry no lens scores yet. And Punjab has reissued its class 10 under a new 2026 PECTAA syllabus, a further generation beyond SNC 2022, which makes Punjab's books the newest in the corpus by some margin and widens the vintage gap that already defeats board comparison in this subject. Confidence is otherwise high, with one caution: roughly half of KP's unit titles are reconstructions, because KP prints its contents pages as decorative images.